I have recently been sharing thoughts about books that are to me “great” in the sense of having the power to engage the reader in new ways of imagining, of loving, acting, and growing.

There are books that are great in an even more extraordinary way: they can sometimes single-handedly shift consciousness so much that a crime like enslavement of people, sometimes singly, often whole families, can at last be seen and emotionally felt for what it is. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe did this. Slave narratives like Frederick Douglass’s did this. I’ve just finished reading two harrowing books out of India that could have similar impact: RIVER OF FLESH and Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction, edited by Ruchira Gupta, and TOWN OF LOVE by Norwegian writer Anne Osby.

This “Town of Love” actually exists in India, and is a place where for centuries the people have lived by exploiting the bodies of girls and women by forcing them into prostitution. In return for sometimes decades long enslavement and severe abuse of their bodies: through rape, beatings, starvation, these women receive barely enough money to keep them alive. When they are no longer “useful” they may be destroyed, literally, or turned out to die alone on the street. In this century women are routinely kidnapped from poor families in India and Nepal as well as other countries and smuggled into an enormously grotesque and ugly (and lucrative to those who live from it) international trade in human flesh.

A recently founded organization, Apne Aap, of which Ruchira Gupta (who edited this volume) is director, struggles heroically to bring attention and liberation to these women and girls in India. Though obviously India isn’t the only place the practice of sexual enslavement of children and women occurs.

What we can do. We can read these books and add the knowledge we gain to the medicine bundle we carry for how we begin to encounter the gravest human disfigurements and illnesses, and ignite in ourselves the insights into unfathomable practices that might contribute to the healing of the world. Care of Woman’s body, and the bodies of female children, must be ground zero of our effort to attain planetary health.

Warning: These books are not for the faint of heart. Some of what is revealed most of us never heard before. Never even thought about it. It will sound quite unbelievable, even with our own American history of centuries of the ultimate trafficking in human flesh.